The disclosure relates to improvements in hardware for mounting percussion instruments, namely, acoustic and/or electronic drum suspension hardware.
Electronic percussion instruments are known as alternatives to acoustic drums or other percussion instruments. An electronic percussion instrument typically includes a trigger pad equipped with various sensors designed to sense the features (e.g., location, intensity, etc.) of the playing impact on the trigger pad. These sensors send a corresponding electronic signal via a wire to a sound module that produces synthesized or sampled percussion sounds based on the electronic signal, which sounds are played through speakers connected to the sound module.
Such electronic percussion instruments are known to be mechanically mounted on support structures, e.g., stands or kit frames, so that they may be played similarly to their corresponding acoustic instruments. However, problems arise due to this traditional mounting structure. First, is in that residual vibration from the playing/performing energy may be transferred to the support structure through the traditional ridged mounting hardware. This residual vibration causes interference with the propagating electronic signal, causing the signal to inaccurately reflect the features of the playing impact. The sound produced by the synthesizer is accordingly impacted. Second, the feel and stick response from the electronic trigger pad with ridged mounting structure, is significantly foreign to that of an acoustic drum mounted on a suspension system. Drumhead manufactures have made advancements to better emulate that of an acoustic drum feel and stick response, namely mesh head material. While this material improves the aforementioned feel characteristics, it still falls short of an acoustic drum and also introduced an undesirable trampoline stick response.
Problems also arise due to the traditional mounting of acoustic instruments on support structures. Again, residual vibration transferred to the support structure may negatively impact the sound properties of the acoustic instrument. Moreover, the sound quality may be further negatively impacted because, for traditional mounting, the acoustic boundary conditions vary significantly from mathematically pure boundary conditions due to the fixed nature and relatively static rigidity of traditional mounting. By way of explanation, mostly pure sound quality from a drum requires the drum to be essentially floating on air without any support. The presence of a support introduces a corresponding area that has a different acoustic boundary condition than areas where the support is not. This affects the acoustic properties of the drum and is equally fixed (non adjustable), thus results in a compromise to the feel and/or sonic property of the drum.
It is therefore desirable to provide advantages over such systems and further be able to control to the feel, stick response and sonic properties of the instrument. Other features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following more detailed description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, which illustrate, by way of example, the principles of the presently described embodiments.